AI empowers Hawaii Department of Transportation to address climate challenges
With the impacts of the climate crisis worsening, including landslides, wildfires, storm surges, flooding, and cliff erosions, infrastructure and systems are at risk. HDOT looked to Google to improve decision-making, pre-empt risks and improve public infrastructure. HDOT is leveraging Google Earth Engine and Google Cloud to deploy a Climate Resilience Platform, which helps them assess risk and prioritize investment decisions based on multiple climate risks, asset conditions, and community impact.
Analyze impacts on communities and infrastructure
HDOT leaders sought out an analytics platform that would allow them to layer on information from diverse data sets and have better visibility of impacts to their system, such as land use, equity, or the condition of the system itself. The agency pulls disparate data into a single platform that is available to both lawmakers and constituents. This data is used to make critical decisions regarding their transportation systems like predicting coastline erosions and moving highways.
The tool itself has between 18 and 20 different layers of decision making,
which are visually presented on a map, so that it's an easy, more visual way
for residents, public officials and lawmakers to see where the risks are. It
is coded with green, yellow and red, which is mapped across the islands to
show low to high risk areas. This is then used to guide where resources are
placed.
"We pull a lot of information into the system, information that's important to
the state. Equity, our economy, our access to opportunities, goods and services,
our ecology, our environment, all of those have to be considered. So we worked
with Google to allow us to layer out all of these different issues into this
one, integrated visual mapping.”
—Ed Sniffen,
Deputy Director,
Highways Division at the Hawaii Department of Transportation
Hawaii’s learnings will make a global impact
Google has about 120 data sets that are collected from different States, while also providing quite a bit of Google’s data sets such as Google Earth Engine data, Google Maps data, Waze data, and public data sets from Google. By using equity data and health data, Google is able to correlate all those data sets and put them into a single platform — one that will be able to assist in predicting extreme weather events and their impacts around the world.
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